Dorcas Saxtorph thinks aloud:
"'In relativity physics, travel faster than light is equivalent to time travel.'" (p. 222)
Is it? Then why does a hyperdrive not function like a time machine or a T-machine, allowing arrival before departure? Is hyperspace outside relativity physics? Well, I suppose it is.
Dorcas continues:
"'We use quantum rules.'" (ibid.)
I don't see that, exactly. In Poul Anderson's Technic History, hyperspatial travelers do use quantum rules because a journey through (that version of) hyperspace is a series of instantaneous quantum jumps.
She concludes:
"'And yet what are we trying on this voyage but to probe the past and what happened long ago?'" (ibid.)
Is thirty years long ago? It can be, depending on perspective. I mentioned the evocativeness of the phrase, "long ago," here. When a young child and I remembered doing something once before, I thought, "We did this last year," but he said, "I remember us doing this a very long time ago!"
Myths live when retold. My memory of a Norse myth is that when, in a question-and-answer competition, the Wanderer asked a king, "What word did Odin whisper in Balder's ear on his funeral pyre long ago?" the king recognized the Wanderer and said, "No one can know what word you whispered in your son's ear on his funeral pyre long ago..."
An author can return us to "long ago" with a chapter change. The Saxtorphs and Tyra Nordbo wonder what happened to Tyra's father, Peter, thirty years ago. On the facing page, Chapter VIII begins with a kzin retrieving Peter Norbo from temporal stasis after an interstellar crossing. The technician growls, "'Up, monkey." (p. 223) Did Kzin have evolutionary equivalents of monkeys to which the feline kzinti contemptuously compare human beings? In an early Asimov story, a reptilian ET says (quoting from memory):
"What are they, after all? Nothing but mammals. Mammals that can think, certainly, but mammals all the same. Evolution must have laughed when she gave a brain to an ape!"
We can still hear the laughter.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
My understanding of Anderson's Technic hyperdrive is that it works by a space ship quantum jumping from point A to point B without traversing the space between those points.
And one of the many bits from Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS that has stuck with me is Gandalf talking to the Steward of Gondor about the Lord of the Nazgul: "King of Angmar long ago..." And by then it had been LONG ago, more than a thousand years since Angmar had been driven out of his old realm.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, it is. According to special relativity, different non-accelerated reference frames are equally valid. In one reference frame, two events take place at the same time, and, for example, five light years apart. In another reference frame, one event takes place three years earlier than the other one, and four light years apart in space. Therefore, FTL travel is equivalent to time travel. Why don’t hyperdrives in science fiction usually function as time machines? Because the authors don’t usually want them to.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Nicholas,
I have read about relativity of simultaneity but that would not allow us to get into our past.
Paul.
Kaor, Nicholas!
Relativity, black holes, quantum mechanics, alternate worlds, the more we know (or think we know) about the "relatively" real universe, the weirder it gets! And not even all scientists totally rule out a hypothetical FTL drive!
Regards! Sean
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